Dinner was not going well in the household of Peter Marty, blacksmith of Junac, and his two sons. ‘Unless you shut up’, Arnold Marty told his father, ‘one of these days you're going to get your block knocked off.’ Enraged by this insolence, Peter picked up the salt cellar from the table and hurled it at his son. Restrained by his friend and dining companion, Arnold could only reply with more thinly veiled threats. ‘You're no son of mine,’ retorted the senior Marty, picking up the bench upon which he was sitting and throwing that too. Arnold beat a hasty retreat from the table and the house.

‘Afterwards’, recorded the scribe in 1323, as Peter's other son Bernard gave evidence before the tribunal of Pamiers, ‘there was for a long time hatred between the witness's father and his brother.’ The row had begun when Peter had challenged his adolescent sons about their late nights and early morning returns. In fact, the younger men had been behaving conscientiously (if not safely or legally) as chaperones, guides and watchmen for Cathar ministers. Fiery tempers and generational religious conflict – would that all deposition records were as arresting.

In many ways, youth is a more problematic category than childhood, not least because it is harder to define and to identify. Our concern is primarily with the sociological phenomenon ‘youth’, rather than with the biological and legal period of adolescence, which is often defined more narrowly.